Emeka Osuji: Why the dog must wag the tail

“A viable polity is not a committee of vultures, hungry for the blood of all, except their own, nor is it a choir of praise singers and boot lickers who criticise corruption but sit expectantly in the corruption lounge begging for an invitation to the dining table. The hallmark of a viable polity is a civil service that understands the difference between national service and personal service and loyalty to the nation as against loyalty to individuals.”

The Pan Atlantic University’s 18^th Inaugural Lecture was recently delivered by Professor Emeka Osuji of its School of Management and Social Sciences. Nduka Nwosu who has been following Osuji’s  trends over the years till date, reminisces on the high points.

How time flies. The 18^th inaugural lecture of Pan Atlantic University which held at the Lagos Business School, Lekki, was one auspicious moment of reunion and reminiscences by old friends after many years apart. For Pan Atlantic University, it was a coming of age, an 18-year track record of academic excellence and very solid on the ground.

The inaugural lecture was marked by the pomp and pageantry of academic procession in the serene LBS environment and delivered by one of its eminent scholars, Professor Emeka Osuji, distinguished Professor of Economics, who while introducing himself  reminded the audience he had been in this business of postulation of theories bordering on the subject for over a quarter of a century.

Osuji has come of age for those who know him. He is many personalities rolled into one, each personality struggling to over power the other. However the Osuji dominant persona realised mid-stream the  direction of the wind, adjusted his compass and made a good sail.

Osuji defined the basis for his lecture with an invocation: “An inaugural lecture is more than a milestone. It is a declaration of purpose, a commitment to continue to push the boundaries of thought and a challenge to embrace the unknown. Beyond that, an inaugural lecture is an Initiation Rite that welcomes an academic as a High Priest of his chosen Temple of Learning, authorised by his academic ancestors to break kola nuts, pour libation(s) and preach the Sacred Words of his ancestors in the Temple of Knowledge.”

This reporter once sat beside Osuji, Ben Akabueze and Ifueko Omoigui-Okauru (MFR) in the Statistics and Accounting classes of Dr. Ikechukwu Nwobodo, then a staff of NNPC and a part time lecturer at the Faculty of Business Administration at the University of Lagos, and Mr. R.S. Wallace,   an Economics First Class graduate from the London School of Economics who lectured in Accounting and did not hesitate to educate you he was ICAN and ICAN was Wallace. He set the ICAN examinations off head and if you wanted to pass his papers, it was in your interest to listen to him, not any other lecturer who would hide behind a PhD and could not set questions off curve.

Wallace resolved all the complex equations and balanced his accounts to produce a perfect balance sheet. If there were students who could not follow Wallace and Nwobodo at first instance, three people stood out as their possible assistants who could help out. Their brains raced sharply ahead of everyone else. Their commentaries were suggestive they had known these figures and calculations earlier before now. Where were they coming from? Everyone asked. Osuji rattled his way through each lesson discussion and Ifueko always predicted where these lecturers were headed; she buried herself in the Science Department complex totally disconnected from humanity especially on weekends.

I was not sure if Osuji had time to read for too long but he had time for every issue that was of national significance and he made his relevant contributions with his commonsensical take on the solution to every problem. He picked the issues that mattered as the lecture proceeded and with a little extra research, he was done. He loved books and much later after graduation, wrote profusely as a journalist who had a column in the Vanguard as well as being  Deputy Business Editor.

In the end Ben Akabueze made a First Class, Ifueko also made a First Class and was the Valedictorian and best all round student of her set. She went ahead to study at the Imperial College London and the Harvard Kennedy School Cambridge while Akabueze went to the LBS and the Harvard Kennedy School (HKS).

Emeka Osuji emerged with a Second Class Upper, surprisingly though because he was in that troika of the most brilliant of their time in the faculty.

While Ifueko chaired the FIRS distinguishing herself with her Restral Consult, board chairmanships and memberships,  Akabueze made it through Price Waterhouse, Citibank, Fidelity Bank, UBA, stepping out successfully as the driver of the top lofty seat of Sterling Bank then NAL Merchant Bank to become a commissioner for Economic Planning and Budget in Lagos State and later Nigeria’s Director of Budget.

Osuji on the other hand was several things at different times working as a Special Assistant and adviser to three distinguished men of banking and finance. Otunba Balogun, Pascal Dozie and Chu SP Okongwu definitely found Osuji’s academic brilliance something to rely on. Even after leaving FCMB, Balogun found him useful for regular contacts, mentioning his name as one of his reliable foot soldiers. He did not disappoint.

As Okongwu’s special assistant, Osuji, at the instance of his principal Okongwu, who was the Honourable Minister of Finance, organised the powerful delegation of Nigerian businessmen and women, corporate chieftains and industry leaders as well as government officials whom President Ibrahim Babangida mandated to visit the Asian Tiger countries, see what they could learn from them, return home to implement same and move the economy to the next destination. Chief MKO Abiola was the head of that delegation with Chief Sonny Odogwu as his deputy. Okongwu was the anchor head of the delegation reprsenting Mr. President. It was one moment of a historical turn around when Babangida welcomed the travelers of about fifty men and women to Dodan Barracks. Osuji also had the additional task of inviting bank CEOs for weekly dialogues with the honourable minister.

Osuji, a man whose compass reminds him its time to unhook his moors and set sail for his next destination, disengaged from Okongwu’s office to start a finance company at a time new banks were emerging in the banking and finance sector. We all taught he was going to start a new bank using what he had learnt at the then International Merchant Bank (IMB) and the First City Merchant Bank (FCMB) and his vast contacts in the banking industry and government circles.

His finance company Leverage suffered the set backs of the time but he was not one to give up, picking a number of lessons in buying and selling, in lending and borrowing and in real estate while going back to run a degree programme in law at his  alma mater and a bachelor of law at the Nigerian Law School. Of course with the prompting of his elder brother, Osuji had enrolled for a Master’s degree programme in Economics shortly after his first degree and went ahead to write his  doctorate in the same department. Osuji is also an alumnus of the Lagos Business School (LBS), the Wharton School of Business, the University of Pennsylvania, to strengthen his negotiation skills, and the Harvard Business School (HBS). It was also not too surprising he disengaged from his finance company at the prodding of Dr. Pascal Dozie, to join him at the headquarters of Diamond Bank where he was working in the chairman’s office as the special assistant. He later moved into the Diamond Pension Fund Custodian Limited as chief executive and has had the privilege of being called to board chairmanships and membership.

Again, before long, Osuji moved into academia, having explored the corporate world and seen it all, convinced academic excellence was what he needed to distinguish himself while churning out his books as his evidence of scholarship.

Osuji reminds me of Dr.Pius Okigbo whose sibling was the famous poet Christopher Okigbo,  seamlessly used his literary prowess to support his knowledge of world history and how economics determined the evolution of civilisation and the building of wealth among nations. He did this interplay between literati and economics to the joy of listeners at the Nigerian Institute of International Affairs (NIIA) Victoria Island.

Osuji’s perfection of the enigmatic persona in the delivery of his economic sermon of the dog wagging the tail or the tail wagging the dog, quickly takes you to the Achebean literary epistles on colonial rule and its effect on the native people, the fairy tales of The Forest of a Thousand Daemons, Fagunwa’s foray into fantasy, reality and religious didacticism where men walk down the streets with their heads and drink palm wine through their noses, a parallel universe of magic and the occult. Here familiar characters such as are portrayed in the historical fiction work of Baroness Orczy’s Scarlet Pimpernel, live a double life because they have the magical powers of disguise or deception used to short change the less fortunate of mankind.

In Osuji’s dialogue with his audience he summarises the two universes he is familiar with , one where men do not speak in the tongue of demons but angels, and the second where the characters create a voodoo universe simply to confuse the rest of us if only to loot our collective commonwealth. It is a scenario comparable to the deceptive characters in government and how colonial rule and independence have failed to resolve the formal and informal phenomenon of governance.

This is how he summarised the awkward situation in the proverbial zoo Republic of Animal Farm: “A viable polity is not a committee of vultures, hungry for the blood of all, except their own, nor is it a choir of praise singers and boot lickers who criticise corruption but sit expectantly in the corruption lounge begging for an invitation to the dining table. The hallmark of a viable polity is a civil service that understands the difference between national service and personal service and loyalty to the nation as against loyalty to individuals.”

One could  hear from his student the echoes of an Okongwu philosophy and ethics of governance for while in government he believed it was demeaning for him to be discussing oil blocks or how to inflate contracts. You could also feel in Osuji’s character the Catholicism that moulded Dozie’s character in his dealings with the wider world.

In his microcosmic paradise, Osuji could not have done what he did with efficiency and best results without having behind him a wife and partner whose devotion and love remain a constant till date. Emile Osuji, an executive director at the Nigerian Deposit Insurance Corporation (NDIC) is a non-pareil in Professor Osuji’s life.

You would think the Osuji persona probably equates with that of his favourite philosopher Aristotle or Isaac Newton who would forget to take care of their well being for the sake of knowledge. Osuji is a town crier in corporate Nigeria but also understands and responds to the needs of his grassroots constituency. Last December he and his wife donated a hospital to his Obiangwu community. Unfortunately he is not your everyday politician and does not crave for visibility for its sake. The vibrant Mezie Owerri he belongs to is a  cultural institution that is a moving spirit of development in his geographical location. Among the members are Nick Oparandudu, a former banker at Diamond and Commissioner for Finance and later Works under Governor Rochas Okorocha, and Dr. Reginald Ihebuzor who was also a Commissioner for Budget and Economic Planning under Governor Emeka Ihedioha and currently the Coordinating consultant of the Niger Delta Development Bank, as well as Chijioke Eke, an Abuja based IT guru.

Professor Osuji is a man of lofty ideas and landmark achievements, not waiting for history to define him but stoops to gather what he needs to make history. Therefore, while hollering three hearty cheers to him for the moment, let us not be caught unawares for what lies ahead in the ecosystem of accomplishments he designs for himself.